GrimReaper

So, instead of adding actual fuel to industry, like every other factory game, NQ is turning schematics into fuel...  The correct answer is right there, it's in every good factory game that I have ever played.  It should have been generators leading up to reactors to give more elements to play with and manage... 
 
This is a train wreck.  I didn't think anything would surpass New World for the most epic-dumpster-fire-trainwreck of a release, but NQ is lining it up so DU has a really good shot at surpassing New World for the worst release.
And just like New World, the only thing more cringe than the train wreck itself, is the white knights that follow saying everything is fine.

I'm starting to think that NQ never really intended to make DU a full-fledged game. Also this sentence on the website "Our unique voxel expertise and technology are incredibly innovative, appealing to a wide audience and suitable for an array of projects." speaks rather for the fact that DU is only a proof of concept of what is possible and it is about licensing the technology to other companies.

Everything makes it sound like DU is running off a skeleton crew now.
 
They don't have time, they don't have time, they don't have time. That's all they can say. 
 
Yet...what's changed in the last 3 months, exactly? They opened the exchange, they added DACs, tweaks graphics slightly, and they refactored the LUA API...? It isn't like it takes them time to ignore posts asking about the wipe...so where is this time going...? 
 
NQ's CEO has been very clear that they are working on new projects other than DU. It's hard to imagine that DU is receiving 100% of NQ's resources with the state of the game and its progress. For all we know, DU is being desperately maintained by a team of a few people as NQ throws money into an NFT pit with their next project. 
 
Of course, DU development has been slow for a long, long time now, so...who really knows 🤷‍♂️
 
And that's why this change will go live -- because they "don't have time" to make something that would actually work. I mean, if it takes 3 months to not even decide about a wipe...it'd probably take 3 years to actually fix industry in a way that doesn't ruin what limited engagement there is. 
 
Be ready for their explanation of why this was the right call and why we're all wrong, hah! 

Its been a while, and I didn't realize that you no longer mine up voxels? o.O Wasn't the whole mining thing a big part of the game? So your saying folks just set up auto miners on the surface and then go collect the stuff periodically? I guess their voxel system is more broken and limited than I thought, as mining was one of the more enjoyable things I liked, hunting down ores deposits, creating data pads with results, selling those to the market.

This game needs fun, and adding more micromanagement tedium is generally not considered fun by players..

I get what you're saying and agree we need sinks and for the economy to get some balance. NQ also dropped the ball on countless occasions with many exploits that they blatantly ignored for months letting the economy get this way in the first place. Schematic shenanigans on .23 release and many other factory bugs that made people trillionaires and jacked up the whole thing. They also have the logs and could have squashed it then, but didn't. 
 
Now they're trying to fix issues they created by being lax on punishing exploits. Doing so by stealing every game mechanic they can from eve and calling it some new thing. Where's the creativity? Who in that meeting said yeah cool lets copy everything CCP does and play it off like someone actually thought of it. 
 
Where's the damn integrity?

As a solo player I can say this... you took a system that worked fine (but took forever to build) and [filtered]ed it up with schematics, and with this change I don't feel like you are going back in the "fun" direction... feels like you are going further into what's wrong with the current system...
 
For a game about building stuff, you seem to love to put roadblocks in front of builders...
 
Edit: I just realized you are implementing the equivalent of microtransactions for schematics...

economic stability, how do you figure they can archive that with people leaving the game?
 
the servers are not the resource, the players are the resources, NQ needs to gain and retain users badly
 
 

Re Reading the Post now and This Gem caught my eye.

"Remaking a feature means investing time into something that may not improve the game if we misfire. It also means risking making something worse, requiring even more time to fix later."

Please Listen @NQ-Kyrios and @NQ-Entropy I believe this is exactly what these changes will do. I fear this will destroy the game that I have come to love, and I want to succeed so badly. Listen to the Factory Builders, and the Ship Builders, I know endgame is PVP space battles, but you cant have that without a good foundation. You need us builders, and honestly with these changes, I may have to look for a new favorite game. 

This is honestly one of the most ill-conceived ideas to ever hit DU.
 
Just get rid of schematics.
That's the end-result that you are going for, but you're trying to get there in the most needlessly confusing way possible.
 
Cut out all the nonsense. Look at the goal you are trying to achieve, and the most fun and satisfying way you can deliver it to players. That way is to just get rid of schematics.

First I will say I'm glad that the Schematics will still exist. However with the current idea that has been presented, I have MANY MANY questions.

As a factory builder who was attracted to this game for the Factory building aspects, (I have no interest in combat or PVP.) the changes that are proposed to the schematics seem to be aimed at frustrating and destroying factories in DU. Looking at Large operations like SVEA and Gottchar this will def wound those operations.

Even small factories having to print and load schematics for 2000 programming boards? 

The post calls out HoneyComb RIP Honeycomb Central. We have several large player built cities that exist in the world and are being built. Atlantis comes to mind. This will make that project so much more frustrating, since now they will need millions of schematics to make the billions of honeycomb needed for the build.

I understand we want player interaction, and that Mega factories cause lag and other issues for the game. But with the addition of the Exchange and this change to schematics. IS NQ building a Sand Box for us to play in? or a playpen? Do you want player interaction? or do you want player interaction that NQ has control in and gets a cut of the profits? 

Also how is Fuel going to work? will we need Schematics for those? how about Warp Cells? We need more information, and once again we have a massive sweeping change to the game. that will destroy at least 2 days of my work building my little tiny medium core factory. Don't even get me started on larger factories that I have no information of. I can imagine how much chaos this will add to SVEA, Gotttchar, Honjo  and so many other large factories. 

Not to mention the new Mini game of loading the schematics in to the machines. I want to play a game to have fun escape the real world for a little while and meet new and awesome people, Not be stuffed into the bowels of my factory twice a week attempting to find all the machines that are now idle because they ran out of copies of copies of schematics. 

Also why charge players for making copies of schematics that they bought? seems like an un needed Tax on the economy? we are already taxed on the land we mine on, The Selling of items in the exchange, Storing Items in the Exchange, Do we think there is going to be a large market for selling single use schematics on the exchange? is that going to be the new way to generate and bleed the factories to death? 

Much like the real world. If we make it difficult for people to produce the things we need in game, then we wont have the items we need to build the ships to play. If you kill all the farms in the real world then we have no food to eat.

Sorry for the Rambling, just a little confused as to why NQ doesn't want us to play their amazing creation.

TLDR; Schematic Changes sound like a bad plan that will kill factories.

The issue I have with this is that 0.23 was launched in December of 2020.
 
The fact that they are complaining about not having enough time when this change has been live over 1.5 years is very annoying.
 
Maybe if you actually made a real design and planned features, you wouldn't need to spend the last several update cycles reworking features!
Maybe if you engineered the game properly, it wouldn't take a year and a half to push such a simple change.
Maybe if you cared (at all) about making a good UX, this wouldn't seem tedious. Do they even have a single UI/UX person on staff? Very, very doubtful. 
 
It constantly feels like they are making excuses...nothing is their fault, so they will never improve as a company. Their bad choices and poor planning is brushed off as "not having enough time"...
 
This studio has zero capacity to learn from their past mistakes.
 
The choices they've made makes it hard to root for them as a player, which makes it hard to offer the "balanced" feedback they apparently crave. If NQ showed a dash of humility, it'd be a lot easier to be positive. 

I'm Glad this thread seems to have progressed to acceptance, however this is still the most horrible idea ever. 

depending on the market to supply the rest of the schematics and paying whatever over inflated prices people come up with so they can afford the new ships is going to be horrible inflation on all things. 

Trying to explain away how other things make this ok. Does  not make this change ok. These changes no matter how the implement them will make the game less fun for the people building industry. 

no amount of trying to figure out how it works or how to work with the system changes these issue with a broken system that they have some how made worse, and NQs decision to go strait to the live server with such a massive change (because of time constraints) tells me they are trying to rush things out the door, to "Fix" the servers for release. 

so I'm guessing they plan on releasing this December to kill all the beta accounts because they think that will fix the money issues.

And yes this change does make it easier for a new player to get into industry, and yes it does help ne players join the servers, but the argument here is, how long are you a new player? how long will it take new players to want to go from making pure ingots to something more costly and this change chokes them out. 

For players that are mostly here for the industry game play this is a massive straw on the proverbial camels back. For me its the last straw. This change WILL cause me to leave the game. (Yeah I know can I have your stuff) This wont change what NQ is doing. I know NQ doesn't care about the people playing the game they just want the money. I'm fine with that its their company, they can chose what they want, but its also my money an I chose to give it to a developer that will actually listen to feedback.

 

Many people like myself enjoy the NON "drama" that only solo play brings. I stopped playing DEC 2020, and returned yesterday just to see what changes have been done. And I can honestly say that what all was changed,  obviously wasn't for the better. My entire org and it was huge, are all gone. 4k max daily players, so income wise that is 40k a month. Yeah good luck paying salaries with that. In 2020 we needed some touch ups like the meta cube ship, a hard reduction in lag, things like that. But someone at DU seems to have made problems (schematics) and then to fix the problem, made more problems (more schematics). And by doing so removed all the fun that is a MMO. Not like we have a ton of quests we can do.  PvP is essentially dead. So if the goal is to make DU a non solo player game, you might as well just shut the doors, or start work on a new game, and write this off as a loss, or maybe sell to a company that can actually fix your mess.. I get this undeniable feeling I won't be resubbing for another month after this. Your just complicating and compounding problems on something that doesn't work( if your digging a hole and you hit rock bottom (4k subs) STOP DIGGING). I had a huge factory, and it was not to make millions, I did that by selling ore excess, I did it because to me the mayhem(prior to schematics) was fun. And now you want to pretty much destroy that fun in favor of what exactly? I can see needing schematics for built ships people put many hours into building, or lua code, for anything else is just HS. Last part of my rant involves the billions you allowed to be had before the beta to "grease the economy". You had bots for that. You used to give new players a ship and a bump in Q doing tutorials (when they worked), and now you have removed underground mining (so dumb) as a means to reduce lag. Why you can't do like no man's sky and just refill the holes and tunnels in short duration is beyond any player here. Mining was one of the more tedious, but fun parts of DU and you removed it in a knee jerk fashion. Outside of going back to before DEC 2020 and just fixing the exploits and issues you had then (which you won't do) is the only real way to bring back players. Wipe the servers of all quanta, all schematics, rewind the game 2 years (when you had a ton of players) and make people claw a bit to get started like any other game. That small nudge when I first played DU was all that was needed. Only thing I would leave in are the skill points, as people actually paid for those with subs as you already knocked off a 1/3 of the time from 90 to 60 a min. Do I think anyone at DU will read this? Nope LOL

Many people like myself enjoy the NON "drama" that only solo play brings. I stopped playing DEC 2020, and returned yesterday just to see what changes have been done. And I can honestly say that what all was changed,  obviously wasn't for the better. My entire org and it was huge, are all gone. 4k max daily players, so income wise that is 40k a month. Yeah good luck paying salaries with that. In 2020 we needed some touch ups like the meta cube ship, a hard reduction in lag, things like that. But someone at DU seems to have made problems (schematics) and then to fix the problem, made more problems (more schematics). And by doing so removed all the fun that is a MMO. Not like we have a ton of quests we can do.  PvP is essentially dead. So if the goal is to make DU a non solo player game, you might as well just shut the doors, or start work on a new game, and write this off as a loss, or maybe sell to a company that can actually fix your mess.. I get this undeniable feeling I won't be resubbing for another month after this. Your just complicating and compounding problems on something that doesn't work( if your digging a hole and you hit rock bottom (4k subs) STOP DIGGING). I had a huge factory, and it was not to make millions, I did that by selling ore excess, I did it because to me the mayhem(prior to schematics) was fun. And now you want to pretty much destroy that fun in favor of what exactly? I can see needing schematics for built ships people put many hours into building, or lua code, for anything else is just HS. Last part of my rant involves the billions you allowed to be had before the beta to "grease the economy". You had bots for that. You used to give new players a ship and a bump in Q doing tutorials (when they worked), and now you have removed underground mining (so dumb) as a means to reduce lag. Why you can't do like no man's sky and just refill the holes and tunnels in short duration is beyond any player here. Mining was one of the more tedious, but fun parts of DU and you removed it in a knee jerk fashion. Outside of going back to before DEC 2020 and just fixing the exploits and issues you had then (which you won't do) is the only real way to bring back players. Wipe the servers of all quanta, all schematics, rewind the game 2 years (when you had a ton of players) and make people claw a bit to get started like any other game. That small nudge when I first played DU was all that was needed. Only thing I would leave in are the skill points, as people actually paid for those with subs as you already knocked off a 1/3 of the time from 90 to 60 a min. Do I think anyone at DU will read this? Nope LOL

This I do not understand.
 
We were  supposed to enter totally empty alien planet in a spaceship and start there from the scratch.
In this original scenario only way to proceed is to be self-sufficient.
Bigger goals maybe by small groups or later in orgs, but self-sufficient still.
 
Now we got tens of fully furnished markets all over the planets in this whole solar system. Who build them. Not us; which we were supposed to build.
 
If ever we can find a new solar system or new planet, will those be full of Market buildings even before one human has stepped down from a ship after finding it?
How to colonies new planets if we can not be self sufficient?
 
This handhelding Themepark game is not what I opted in at Kickstarter.
 
Before 0.23 there was lots of in-game interactions. Game was alive and fun. Schematics killed all of that. 
 
Interactions between players will newer happen by force. No way!
NQ: Stop this interactions by force nonsense
 
Interactions will only happen if we, the players, choose to do so.
 
Edit:
ps. How will using markets create interactions between players???
I can do most of my business anonymously and remotely. Even if I visit marketplace I newer interact with a player "because doing business." Current markets just do not need or enable player-interactions.
 
Before 0.23 we had lots of group-game-play operations, Mining ops, Hauling stuff for org members (way before missions), building together, helping to fix ships, rescue missions, manufacturing for other org members, you name it, we did it.
None of those required interventions by Aphelia nor using Markets.
 
We avoided markets because of all that junk and lag there. Some created own in-org markets by using dispensers in a creative way.
I created small factory and org members started to bring in ore and I manufactured (only) what they needed.
Our small org had only 3 factories, other members were using our services.
Building "‘build-it-all’ Mega factory" was in our plans as a Shared Org - project. What was wrong in that???
 
We did not need guidance by Aphelia or NQ.
 
Who ever said there was not enough interactions before 0.23 did lye.
 
Secondly:
 ‘build-it-all’ factory manufactures nothing. Nothing at all. Running that kind of factory is a huge effort which only few players want to do.
‘build-it-all’ factory actually creates interactions and enables group-game-play. Manufacturing only few items and selling them at markets kills interactions.
Also factories mostly produce elements which have no use as they are when they appear into container. Those elements only enables further more advanced game-play such as PVP, ship building (both for pvp and other ships) . etc.
 
 

Honestly, I think this new proposed system is even worse than the current implementation of schematics. First, because it adds yet another two chores for the players, which are:
- Babysitting your character's schematic copying queue
- Going through each and every machine putting down new schematics
 
Let's get this out and clear, the whole point of industry and factories in a game is to automate things you don't want to do manually. If players were into having to babysit their stuff like this the nanopack would have way more usage than it currently does.
 
This new feature isn't gonna add more "fun" or "engagement" to the game, but just add yet another artificial limitation. You keep promoting the game as a player-driven sandbox but also try to mold it in your own ways, meanwhile things that should be given a bit more of attention, such as the gameplay department of "things to do inside the game" is lacking, specially after you're past the grinding part and into the "let's have fun" part, and adding a chore to the game won't fix that.
Like, why would someone pay a subscription of something where the only thing they have to do is to once in a while copy some schematics or calibrate miners, but have nothing actually fun to do?
 
Also, this new approach to schematics gives alt-account players yet another benefit. By this point I honestly think it's something intentional or by design, like an attempt at bringing P2W into DU but not in a very explicit way. I know NQ is desperate about money and keeping afloat, but maybe you should look into other ways of making an income, maybe letting players buy merch or even talent points and quanta, at least you would be honest about it.
 
Finally, if you guys want to make DU something cool and attractive, then why not look into stuff such as NPC fights or in-game events? Or lore and community quests? I mean, it's way better than adding yet another babysitting/chore "feature" that sounds worse than the already bad schematics we currently have...

Hey NQ peeps,

I think simplifying schematics is an awesome idea.  Schematics should really be for complicated devices, not turning ore into metals.

The duplicating and consuming of schematics is an over complication of the system. I also don't believe it will address your industry goals. 
 
A simpler system would be that all industry machines cause wear as they operate. (or in the underlying game, each element has hitpoints and industry units will take damage as they operate).  Zero hitpoints equals a destroyed industry unit.  You could even extend the repair mechanic to industry.  The point is that you'll have to consume more resources to maintain your industry as it scales up.  This feels less arbitrary than copying schematics and consuming them. 
 
Cheers, DJStraylight